If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance Magento (or Adobe Commerce, as it’s now known) has stopped feeling like a platform and started feeling like a project. Licence renewals, hosting bills, and a growing dependency on developers for changes that should take minutes tend to be what pushes brands to start seriously scoping a move to Shopify.
This guide covers everything you need to know before you commit: what a migration actually costs, how long it realistically takes, what happens to your data, and how to protect the SEO rankings you’ve spent years building, based on migrations we’ve run for brands including Bella Freud, Newby Teas, and Jasmine Silk.
Why brands are leaving Magento for Shopify.
We have this conversation almost daily. Usually, it starts when a brand receives its upcoming Adobe Commerce licence renewal and realises the ROI no longer stacks up. But it’s rarely just the licence fee. It’s the hidden tax of staying on Magento: creeping hosting costs, mandatory security patches that break third-party plugins, and server anxiety every time Black Friday approaches.
Marketing teams tell us they feel paralysed. When swapping a homepage banner or launching a new product bundle requires a developer ticket and a staging deployment, you lose the agility needed to compete. Shopify’s hosted infrastructure eliminates server management and PCI compliance headaches, giving the ecommerce team day-to-day control back. Brands aren’t just moving to save money; they are moving to stop managing infrastructure and start focusing on growth. Furthermore, the multi-store and multi-currency complexities that used to tether enterprise brands to Magento are now handled elegantly by Shopify Plus and Shopify Markets, making the leap not just viable, but highly strategic.
How much does a Magento to Shopify migration cost?
There’s no single number; cost depends on catalogue size, how many custom Magento modules you’re replacing, whether you need B2B functionality, and how much of your frontend needs rebuilding rather than reskinning. As a planning benchmark:
| Store profile | Typical cost range | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Small catalogue, no custom modules, standard Shopify | £25,000 – £40,000 | 8–12 weeks |
| Mid-market, moderate customisation, Shopify Plus | £50,000 – £85,000 | 12–16 weeks |
| Enterprise / B2B, ERP integration, custom frontend | £90,000 – £150,000+ | 16–24+ weeks |
What drives cost up.
- Custom Magento extensions and modules. Anything bespoke needs to be rebuilt as a Shopify app, a custom Shopify Function, or native functionality; it doesn’t transfer.
- B2B pricing and customer group rules. Magento’s customer-group pricing logic needs remapping to Shopify B2B catalogues.
- ERP and ecosystem integrations. NetSuite, SAP, and similar connectors are rebuilt, not migrated; the connector availability and complexity for your specific ERP is often the single biggest cost variable. When we migrated Newby Teas, the site itself was only part of the job; the real complexity was unifying four separate warehouses running SAP, SAGE, and Odoo, which we solved using Patchworks for three warehouses and a native connector for the fourth. That kind of back-office complexity is invisible on the frontend but can be the biggest driver of both cost and timeline.
- Multi-store, multi-region, or multi-currency setups. These typically map to Shopify Markets or Shopify Plus expansion stores. Newby Teas needed to support nine markets with region-specific payment gateways and local-currency payouts, the kind of requirement that’s easy to underscope if it isn’t flagged early.
- Frontend complexity. A close reskin is far cheaper than a full custom Shopify Plus build.
How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take?
As shown in our benchmark data above, a real-world migration takes anywhere from 8 to 24+ weeks depending on your ecosystem. A standard Shopify build for a straightforward catalogue can be turned around in 8 to 12 weeks. Mid-market brands migrating to Shopify Plus with moderate customisations and data complexities usually look at 12 to 16 weeks. For enterprise or B2B replatforms with deep ERP integrations (like NetSuite or SAP) and international markets, expect the project to run for 4 to 6 months.
Anyone promising a full enterprise migration in two weeks is likely quoting for a data import, not a real migration. The audit, redirect mapping, bespoke theme build, app rebuild, integration work, and end-to-end QA are where the calendar time actually goes. Rushing this timeline is the fastest way to break your site and your search rankings.
What actually happens to your data.
A migration touches four categories of data, and each behaves differently.
Products, categories & inventory.
Moving your catalogue is rarely a straightforward copy-paste. Magento’s complex EAV (Entity Attribute Value) architecture doesn’t directly translate to Shopify out of the box. We typically use robust tooling like Matrixify combined with custom scripts to carefully extract, transform, and load this data.
Magento’s sprawling attributes map specifically to Shopify Metafields and Metaobjects, keeping your front-end filtering and product data rich. Magento Categories are converted into Shopify Automated or Manual Collections. However, automation only gets you 90% of the way there. The remaining 10% requires manual cleanup: restructuring messy legacy tags, consolidating duplicate attributes, and ensuring variant images are perfectly assigned before going live.
Customer accounts & passwords.
Customer data migration is one of the more delicate parts of a Magento to Shopify move, because passwords can’t be transferred directly between platforms for security reasons. This needs a deliberate plan, not an afterthought.
The short version of how we handle it:
- Contact Shopify Support in advance to temporarily disable automated “account created” emails, so existing customers aren’t confused by unexpected notifications mid-migration.
- Export customer records and addresses from Magento, combine them, and run a dry-run import through Matrixify to validate the data before it touches your live store.
- Review and clean the data – tags, metafields (DOB, VAT ID), address formatting, and email/phone validity are the most common failure points.
- Run the live import, then re-enable customer notifications.
- Plan the customer-facing side: since passwords can’t migrate, customers need a clear password-reset journey at first login, backed by a short email campaign and an on-site notice explaining the change.
Order history.
We generally recommend migrating a rolling 12 to 24 months of order history into Shopify as live, active data so customers can log in, view their recent purchases, and seamlessly initiate returns. Older, historical orders are often better left as read-only archived data, either stored in a separate data warehouse or imported purely as timeline notes. This keeps your new Shopify admin lightweight and fast. It’s important to set expectations upfront: customers should know that while their recent history is safe, legacy orders from several years ago may not appear in their new, streamlined dashboard.
Reviews, wishlists & subscriptions.
These elements are entirely app-dependent. Because custom Magento extensions don’t migrate natively to Shopify, your review data (e.g., Trustpilot, Yotpo, Okendo), wishlists, and active subscriber data need to be extracted and re-mapped to their specific Shopify app equivalents. Subscription migrations are particularly delicate because payment gateway tokens must be securely transferred without disrupting automated billing cycles. We always flag these data points early in the discovery phase, as they require dedicated integration planning rather than a default bulk import.
Will you lose your Google rankings?
This is the question that keeps marketing directors up at night, and the honest answer is: some ranking fluctuation in the first few weeks after launch is normal, but it should be temporary if the migration is planned properly. Losses become permanent when redirects are missed, or metadata isn’t preserved.
The 301 redirect map.
Magento stores every URL a product, category, or page has ever had. Before launch, export this in full and map every single one to its Shopify equivalent. This is the single highest-leverage SEO task in the entire migration, and skipping it is the most common cause of lasting traffic loss. On Jasmine Silk’s migration, that meant mapping over 3,000 URLs from Magento to Shopify Plus with a full 301 redirect plan built on top of a dedicated technical SEO audit and site architecture review, done in time to launch ahead of their peak season without disrupting search visibility.
Metadata and structured data continuity.
Titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and schema markup should carry over or be improved, and never left blank on launch day. Our standard protocol involves a rigorous pre-launch metadata audit, using tools to crawl the staging site and ensure every single title tag, meta description, and schema markup perfectly matches or improves upon the live Magento site before we flip the switch.
DIY tools vs an agency-led migration – which do you need?
| DIY migration tools | Agency-led migration | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Simple catalogues, no custom Magento extensions, no agency support needed | Custom pricing logic, B2B, ERP integrations, or brands that can’t afford SEO/downtime risk |
| What it moves | Data (products, customers, orders) | Data and behaviour – custom logic, integrations, and design |
| Typical limitation | Doesn’t rebuild custom functionality or handle complex redirect strategy | Higher upfront cost, but built to protect revenue and rankings through the transition |
If your Magento setup is close to out-of-the-box, a tool-led approach may genuinely be enough. If you’ve got custom modules, multi-store complexity, or B2B pricing, that’s where migrations go wrong without experienced hands on the redirect map and integration rebuild.
Common mistakes that turn a migration into a disaster.
When a replatform goes off the rails, it’s rarely a failure of the technology itself. It almost always comes down to a lack of planning and falling into one of these easily avoidable traps:
- Botching the 301 redirect map. Relying entirely on automated tools without manual QA is the number one cause of catastrophic and permanent traffic drops post-launch.
- Underestimating custom integration rebuilds. Assuming a bespoke Magento module has a cheap, 1-to-1 plug-and-play app equivalent on Shopify without proper technical scoping.
- Failing to plan the password-reset journey. Leaving customers confused on launch day because their old passwords no longer work, resulting in lost conversions and a massive spike in customer service tickets.
- Migrating “the junk drawer”. Moving every single inactive product, broken image, and obsolete tag instead of using the replatform as a chance to ruthlessly audit and clean your database.
- Treating it purely as a “lift and shift”. Blindly copying a poor Magento UX over to Shopify rather than taking the opportunity to optimise the user journey, mobile experience, and checkout flow.
- Testing exclusively in a vacuum. Failing to perform end-to-end QA with real-world ERP, warehouse, and fulfilment syncs on a staging environment prior to the launch switch.
Real migration results.
When a Magento to Shopify migration is scoped accurately and executed meticulously, it doesn’t just protect your current revenue; it acts as a catalyst for immediate growth. Here is what that looks like in practice for brands we’ve recently partnered with:
- Newby Teas: Migrated from a technical-debt-heavy Magento site to a bespoke Shopify Plus build, unifying D2C and B2B operations across four warehouses and nine international markets. Delivered a 43% increase in add-to-cart rate and a 41% uplift in conversion rate immediately post-launch.
- Jasmine Silk: Migrated from Magento (Adobe Commerce) to a premium Shopify Plus storefront, redirecting over 3,000 URLs to safeguard SEO performance ahead of peak season. Delivered +20% page views, +20% conversion rate, and +35% average order value.
- Bella Freud: Migrated from Magento to Shopify Plus with a bespoke theme, delivering +20% conversions, +13% new users, and -10% bounce rate year on year.
Your Magento to Shopify migration checklist.
Whether you are scoping the move in-house or partnering with an agency, keep this essential pre- and post-launch checklist handy to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
- Audit your current Magento catalogue and prune inactive products
- Export your full URL list (url_rewrite table) for redirect mapping
- Map custom Magento extensions to Shopify apps or native functionality
- Plan your customer password-reset communication
- Set up a staging environment for full pre-launch QA
- Build and QA your 301 redirect map
- Preserve/improve metadata and structured data
- Submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console within 24 hours of launch
- Monitor rankings and traffic closely for the first 4–8 weeks post-launch
Not sure where to start?
Every migration is different, and the fastest way to get a realistic cost and timeline is a short scoping call, not a generic calculator. As a Platinum Shopify agency, we can help you with that! Get in touch for a free migration scope and see what Shopify costs for your business.
